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The Future of MCP — David Soria Parra, Anthropic
Takeaway
MCP is becoming the universal context protocol — moving beyond tools to ship full apps that both humans and models interact with.
Summary
- MCP hit 110M monthly downloads in ~18 months — roughly 2x faster than React reached the same volume — driven by OpenAI ADK, Google ADK, LangChain and thousands of frameworks adopting it.
- Protocol evolved from local-only tools to remote servers with OAuth, centralized authorization, elicitation, tasks, and experimental MCP Applications that ship UI components rendered by clients.
- MCP Applications let a server deliver both a human UI and model-callable tools through one protocol — the same server works in Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code, Cursor.
- 2025 was exploration; 2026 focus is putting MCP-powered agents into production behind closed doors connecting company systems.
mcpprotocolanthropic
Original description
In this Keynote, I will lay out what I believe will be true for agents in 2026 and how MCP plays a part in this. Let's take a look what connectivity for agents might look like. Speaker info: - https://x.com/dsp_ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-soria-parra-4a78b3a/ - https://github.com/dsp Timestamps 0:00 Introduction and the vision for MCP applications 1:34 Looking back at the evolution of the MCP ecosystem over the last 18 months 2:30 Ecosystem growth and adoption milestones 3:46 Moving from exploration in 2025 to production in 2026 5:07 The 2026 connectivity stack: Skills, MCP, and CLI/Computer use 7:47 Improving client harnesses: Progressive Discovery 9:39 Programmatic tool calling and agent orchestration 12:00 Best practices for designing agents and server authors 13:42 Future roadmap for the MCP protocol and core improvements 15:23 Strategic integrations and enterprise features 16:32 Upcoming extension mechanisms and skills over MCP 17:15 Conclusion and call for community feedback